


Jean Genie

by lagardère (laurore)



Category: Trust (TV 2018)
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Genie/Djinn, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Paul is a genie, Poor Life Choices, Primo's motivations remain unchanged, That's it that's the plot, very questionable morals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-16 19:07:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29337267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurore/pseuds/lagard%C3%A8re
Summary: “I’m a genie,” the boy repeated.Aside from the flared jeans, he wore a sparkly blue cardigan over a hideous orange tie-dye t-shirt. He looked as unkempt as any hippie Primo had ever glimpsed in Rome. A rich bohemian kid, playing at being god.“You get three wishes and then we’re done. Basically. It can be pretty much anything you want.”“Can you make me richer than the richest man in the world?”
Relationships: John Paul Getty III/Primo Nizzuto
Comments: 17
Kudos: 41





	Jean Genie

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MissAntlers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissAntlers/gifts).



> as usual i started with a niche pairing in a niche fandom and proceeded to write an even nicher fic. if you happen to give this fic a chance in spite of the absurd premise, I would love to hear from you!
> 
> (with thanks to MissAntlers, my Trust partner in crime, who first received this fic as an advent calendar, in the shape of 25 badly-folded paper planes... and gratitude to febricant, for an early reading & some very kind comments)

**1.  
  
**

The robbery had taken a dramatic turn, but then again that was often the case when Primo was involved. 

He would not go so far as to accept responsibility for the way things had turned out. If the guy he’d brought along (Enzo, whom Primo had known since school and who’d treated this trip to Rome like a goddamn adventure) hadn’t blurted out his name in a moment of bewildered joy as he removed stacks of bills from the safe, the both of them would have made away with the money and left the old couple tied up where they were, trembling and whimpering in their nightgowns. As it was, Primo had killed them, one shot that went through both their heads, and he’d killed Enzo, too. What use did he have for a man who couldn’t hold his tongue? He’d bagged the stacks of lire and the jewellery, leaving behind all those things he’d have a hard time transporting and selling, claw-footed chairs and landscapes in ornate gold frames, that one bronze carving of a lion attacking a horse he’d taken a shine to and would have put up in his office if he’d had such a thing as an office, a room where people came in to do business and pay their respects to him much as they did with his uncle, except his uncle’s office was the drab kitchen in his farmhouse, with the floor of beaten earth, the black deposit on the ceiling, decades if not centuries’ worth of soot.

Turning over the drawers in the living-room, he’d found and pocketed a large silver lighter. He’d liked the weight of it in his hand, the slender silhouette engraved on one side with its wild tumble of hair, some horny sculptor’s depiction of Christ, he’d assumed, at once haunted and languid. The lines were etched deep, something to run his fingers over contemplatively as he surveyed the mess him and Enzo had made of the room. Eventually, he pulled the handkerchief from around his neck and doused it in alcohol.

Maybe he’d always known Enzo would screw up. At any rate, he hadn’t been surprised when he had, and he hadn’t minded killing him. Primo had some experience robbing the houses of people whose belongings could have fed and clothed his Calabrian village for the next two generations. He was used to burning down those houses afterwards, ostensibly to cover his tracks; maybe as some sort of statement against a wasteful lifestyle he knew would never be his own. It seemed fitting to set fire to the house with the dead couple’s own lighter. A proper send-off.

What he hadn’t expected was for the lighter to conjure up a boy alongside the shivering yellow flame, a tall boy with a wild tumble of red hair and haggard eyes who stared at Primo first, then at the open doorway behind him, where the bodies of the old Roman couple were still tied back to back, Enzo sprawled at their feet. His full mouth curved into a faint expression of disgust, nothing like what Primo might have expected from a stranger walking in, barefoot, on a triple homicide.

“I’m a genie,” the boy said. “You summoned me so I’m at your service. Something like that.”

The strangest of all, perhaps, stranger even than this lazy explanation, was that he did not speak Roman Italian, but the fast, tangled dialect of Primo’s childhood.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**2.**

  
Before he left, he flicked the lighter again, three or four times, trying to understand the boy’s trick. On the third time, the boy hadn’t so much appeared as he’d fallen to the floor, red curls in disarray, nursing the ankle on which he’d landed. He had long hands, Primo noticed. Long legs, long hair. He was wearing jeans. He’d flicked the lighter once more after that, causing the boy to vanish as the first tendrils of smoke rose up from the bottom of the stairs where he’d dropped the flaming rag. With the lighter in his pocket, the bag of stolen money slung over his shoulder, Primo escaped through a window onto the roof and into the night.

He’d been brought up on stories of angels and demons, and at first he assumed the boy must be some strange mixture of the two. His likeness could be seen on the walls of many a church in Calabria, winged, glassy-eyed creatures, their blond or brown or red curls painted with mathematical precision, the soft curves of their cheeks, their delicate fingers inviting the touch of an irreverent hand. As for demons, they grinned from the top of columns, from the sprawl of paintings and bas-reliefs depicting the Last Judgment, and though Primo couldn’t remember the fate they reserved to thieves, whether they hung them or boiled them or cut off their hands and tied them around their necks, he was quite sure demons didn’t go around offering favours, unless it was the sort of bargain that brought an abrupt end to your life and condemned you to eternal damnation.

Another man would have left the lighter to burn along with the Roman villa. Yet another would have gone to a priest for advice. Primo had long outgrown his fears, however, religious and otherwise. Once he was well out of the city, he brought his Alfetta to a stop on the side of a deserted stretch of road, sat on the dusty red hood, and ignited the lighter.

The boy peered at him; a wary animal. 

“Did you kill them? The people back there?”

“What if I did?” Primo shrugged. Some part of him wanted to impress the boy. Some part of him wanted to reach out and feel his shoulder blades for the broken remnants of wing bones. He had thought over what question he should ask on the long drive south, had thought about it as he did most things, with the windows rolled down and some American tune blaring through the speakers, the coke he’d snorted imbuing him with a reckless sort of focus. It didn’t matter what the boy was - the only thing that mattered was how Primo might make use of this opportunity.

“What can you do?” he asked, pulling out his pack of cigarettes.

The hunger was plain on the boy’s face. He crossed his arms as if he was bracing himself against the cold, although it wasn’t cold by any measure, not on such a bright summer day, on this dirt road that slashed a sunflower field in two. 

“I’m a genie,” the boy repeated. 

Aside from the flared jeans, he wore a sparkly blue cardigan over a hideous orange tie-dye t-shirt. He looked as unkempt as any hippie Primo had ever glimpsed in Rome. A rich bohemian kid, playing at being god. 

“You get three wishes and then we’re done. Basically. It can be pretty much anything you want.”

“Can you make me richer than the richest man in the world?”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**3.**

  
“It’s not an exact science,” the boy apologised.

Primo had conjured him the moment he’d opened the boot and found it full of money. Dollars, to be exact, enough of them that he’d had to close it again before they scattered in the night breeze. The money wasn’t in orderly stacks, either. It was just one big jumble of bills that had seen better days, as if the boy had summarily turned a sack of dead leaves into dollars and upended the sack in the boot.

“I’m assuming it’ll just fill up again whenever you pull some money out. That’s what happened with Fabio and Gina - that’s the people you killed, by the way… But with them the money appeared inside an old suitcase. I’m guessing it went up in flames when you burnt down their house. I think you’ll have to keep this car forever now.”

Primo cracked the boot open once again and pulled out a handful of bills. As far as he could tell, they looked real. He allowed himself a smile for what felt like the first time in days. 

“You’re a lucky find, hippie.”

“Oh, you can call me Paul. You know, I always wonder if that’s what everyone asks for. A lot of money, I mean... I haven’t been doing this for a very long time, but I know I wished for money, I needed it to pay my debts, and Fabio and Gina used it to buy all those artworks, even though they weren’t really poor to begin with. And now you want money as well. What will you do with it? I’m thinking that this might be how my grandfather became rich - he had the lighter before me. What should I call you?”

Somewhere on the nearby piazza, a shutter slammed shut. The street was unlit and the facades looked blind, the lights out inside the rooms, the shutters fastened, but people would know anyways. There was no such thing as a secret in Calabria, not for the Calabrians. Without knowing the whole truth they would figure out enough details to create an approximation of it. _Primo Nizzuto brought someone home last night. They talked outside for a long time. Someone with a head of wild hair. His uncle has always been one for hookers, but Primo himself, he’s a strange one. He’ll be planning something, wait and see._

“Come on,” Primo decided. “Are you hungry?”

“Jesus, yes. I haven’t eaten anything in ages. Even just an apple would be good.”

In the hallway Primo lit a cigarette for the boy, but he didn’t turn on the light. Paul must have glimpsed some of it anyways, the faded wallpaper that was already there in Primo’s grandfather’s time, the silver cross on the wall, his mother’s one prized possession. In the kitchen he put water to boil, as if he hadn’t just become the richest man in Italy, as if he was used to cooking pasta instead of snorting a line of coke and knocking back a glass of whiskey and forgetting to fall asleep. Paul’s gift of riches did seem worth a meal, at the very least, although as it turned out, that wasn’t what the boy wanted the most. From the way his eyes followed Primo’s hands as he tipped coke onto his finger, with a tired sort of longing, it seemed they had more in common than Primo had thought at first.  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**4.**

  
As far as Primo’s uncle was concerned, Primo was little more than an unruly child. It hardly mattered that he was thirty-three years old by now and that he’d killed people with his uncle’s blessing. People he’d robbed, people who’d neglected to pay their dues, people who’d betrayed his uncle one way or another. Don Salvatore would always belittle him, and Primo wasn’t so naive that he couldn’t see this posturing for what it really was: a way to curb his ambitions and put him back in his place; fear, of a sort.

When Primo stepped into the kitchen, Salvatore drew him in and kissed him on both cheeks. He also asked, “What the fuck are you doing here?” 

The room smelled like onion soup and sheep, even if the sheep had long been led out of the farm and up to the pastures to graze. In the corner between the door and the window, Salvatore’s accountant was peeling potatoes. Primo had known Leonardo when he was a young man who stayed up late smoking and drinking with his friends, and he’d known him when he became an honoured man, too, fire reflected in his dark eyes as he stood beside the burning body of one of the Don’s enemies. Of late, Leonardo had turned into something of a middle-aged bore. He’d begun frowning as soon as Primo had walked in.

“I’ve brought you a gift, uncle” Primo said, and slammed a bag full of money onto the table. “You should come out and see.”

At first, the men were incredulous. Salvatore told Primo to empty the boot of the Alfetta, down to the last dollar, before he slammed it shut and opened it again, and when he found it to be full, he told him to empty it once more. This time he checked the corners, swarthy hands feeling around for some hidden panel. When the boot once again turned up a sea of crumpled bills, Salvatore’s eyes began to shine with a familiar light.

“The creature will grant me anything I ask him for,” Primo said. “I just have to ignite some old lighter.”

“Show it to me,” Salvatore demanded.

Primo tapped his fingers against the lighter in his pocket.

“Later - I thought it was better to keep it somewhere safe.”

“Leonardo, what could we get out of this?”

“This is a terrible idea.” Leonardo had been muttering between his teeth as he watched the pile of money grow on the dirt track. “Whatever this is, he should put it back where he found it, or better, throw it into the water somewhere where it won’t be found.”

“You have to be clever with such things,” Salvatore mused. “I could ask it for eternal good fortune. Or for the power to recognise a traitor on sight.”

“That's too vague,” Primo countered. “If this is all we’re going to do with it, maybe I should just keep it to myself.”

Salvatore slapped him. “A gift is a gift,” he declared.

Primo - his ears ringing with the memory of many such slaps, of his father’s boot grazing his jaw and his father’s belt falling across his back and Salvatore’s ring catching on his lip - decided to hold his tongue, and bide his time.

  
  
  


**5.**

  
Leonardo followed Primo back to his car. They made an odd pair, Primo in his leather jacket, grinning under his moustache, and Leonardo in his mustard-coloured cardigan and shapeless loafers, who looked about as grim as if Primo had walked into that kitchen to announce that Calabria was about to flood and they should all move to Rome.

“This is the worst idea you’ve ever had, and you’ve had a number of disastrous ideas.”

“Oh, come on,” Primo scoffed, as he eased into the car. “It’ll make our fortunes. In fact…” He nodded towards the boot. “It’s already made mine. I just hope that when the time comes, Salvatore knows what to wish for. _The power to recognise a traitor on sight._ That old geezer.”

“Don’t,” Leonardo warned him, his hand coming down hard on the ledge of Primo’s window. “He knows what he’s doing. You don’t. A magical creature granted you three wishes? For fuck’s sake, Primo. Don’t you even think of trying to use this against your uncle.”

“We could build an empire with this boy,” Primo insisted, although he kept his voice low. “We could build an empire just from the money in the boot of the car. You don’t want to be poor forever, do you? Think of what this money could do for your son. Unless you want him to grow into…” He gestured towards Leonardo’s graying curls, his sloping shoulders. “You must have wanted something for yourself, once. Can’t you remember what that felt like? I want an empire and Salvatore… He’d have us build a fortress.” 

Primo hadn’t looked at Leonardo in years, not really, not unless it was with a passing, cursory glance preceding a biting joke about old men and wasted potential. Leonardo was maybe twelve years older than him. Primo was looking at him now. 

“Is that what you want ?” he asked.

“We’re not building anything,” Leonardo snapped at him. “Salvatore’s the don here, not you. Until he gets an idea about what we should do…”

“You realise this is going to take decades, right? Salvatore doesn’t get _ideas_.”

Leonardo cuffed him on the head.

“Keep those thoughts to yourself, you fucking idiot. You better walk the line if you don’t want your uncle to cut off both your legs. He was in the business before you were born. You’ve made some unwise investment together. Fine. You’ll do it on his terms.”

 _What business?_ Primo wanted to argue. Being successful in crime required daring. A vision. Primo’s uncle had neither of these things. What he had was a farm, sheep and goats, and the respect of everyone in the village because he’d set up a moderately successful extortion racket within a ten mile radius. He’d stopped at the mountains. Primo wouldn’t have. Primo wanted what was beyond the mountains - the whole world, if he could get his hands on it, and he didn’t think that would require giving up on Calabria.

Enough, he decided, and hit the accelerator as Leonardo stumbled backwards. 

Yet, he would go on thinking about it a while longer, Leonardo who’d come after him to ensure he did intend to keep his side of the bargain. Salvatore hadn’t met that many accountants in his life, but he still swore Leonardo was the best of them, possessor of these two qualities that Salvatore prized above all else: a good head with numbers, and loyalty. And maybe Salvatore was right in this one respect: to run a crime syndicate, you needed trustworthy partners.

  
  


**6.**

  
“You haven’t spent any of the money,” Paul noted. Primo glanced at him from where he lounged on his grandmother’s couch, holding one of the only two glasses he hadn’t broken when he’d come back from her funeral three years ago. His grandmother had been a mean old crone, but she’d been a vast improvement over his brute of a father, and his empty shell of a mother. 

“I guess I thought you’d just burn through it faster than your car could follow. Drugs and hookers, that kind of thing.” 

“Maybe I will,” Primo shrugged. “Maybe I’ll buy drugs by the ton and start a business.”

Paul sat cross-legged on the floor, wearing a pair of Primo’s socks. The small lamp on the table set fire to his red hair and lit up the wall at his back like a stage. Primo didn’t mind the dim lighting, not after going through a bottle of wine and doing several lines of coke on the scarred coffee table, side by side with the boy, one hand absently holding back Paul’s hair for him. They’d looked at each other as the drugs hit, with mirroring smiles, as if they’d found something in the other that they couldn’t fail to like.

“Tell me a story,” Primo decided.

“A story?”

“You said you were at my service, didn’t you?”

Paul’s smile vacillated. 

“Yeah man, sure.”

He put his hands together, long fingers linked into some unreadable shape that became, by way of the play of shadows on the bright yellow wall, a goat with two long horns.

“It’s the story of this goat. Young and stupid but all goats are stupid at that age. And the goat meets a wolf…” The goat’s head lengthened into the wolf’s snout. “And the wolf tells her, I could give you anything you want. Anything at all. It’s a simple kind of bargain, really. You get to ask two things of me, and I’ll ask one of you in return. The goat was bored to death of being stuck in the same six feet of grass all day, at the end of a too-short rope. She’d been warned about wolves, but that wolf stood behind a gate, and the goat thought it was safe, you know?”

“What did she ask for, your goat?” Primo asked, reclining in the couch as he tipped the glass against his lips and took another swallow of wine.

“I want as much grass as I could ever eat,” Paul’s goat said.

“There’s grass in the meadow past the gate,” the wolf said.

“I want to see the world.”

“The world is right outside the gate,” the wolf said.

“Open the gate,” the wolf said.

Paul put his hands on his knees. “That’s how he got me,” he said. “Made me drink and gave me a lot of nonsense about how I’d be free of the world’s expectations, and the next thing I knew I was trapped in that lighter. I used my third wish so we’d swap places. I bet he’s still partying in Rome, the previous genie. That’s what I’d be doing, if I were him.”

  
  


**7.**

  
The house was never Primo’s house. One night after his grandmother died he’d borrowed a truck and driven to a fallow field belonging to a boy he’d known from school, who’d sucked him off and then punched him in the teeth, _Don’t tell anyone about this,_ as if Primo would have, as if the blood in his mouth could have prevented him from doing so, if he’d wanted to. Under cover of darkness, Primo had unloaded the truck in the boy’s field: most of his father’s belongings, his stained grey jumper and loose-fitting chequered trousers, his pipes, his shoes with the worn-down heels, his belts and his hats, and then his mother’s, the dark pile of her three old dresses, her dressing gown and her rosary, the solid oak table they’d been given as a wedding present, their bedsheets and a hatstand and a rocking-chair. He’d doused it all in gasoline and he’d struck a match. By the time the boy caught wind of the smoke, in the early hours of the morning the next day, there was little left of Primo’s bonfire except a large circle of scorched earth.

Afterwards, there was less of his parents in the house, but it still wasn’t his house. Maybe he’d buy one with the money he’d got from the boy, maybe he’d keep going as he had, living out of his car and in Roman clubs and Calabrian watering holes, sleeping in snatches and flashes, chasing the next high. 

“I like the sound of bells here,” Paul said, from where he’d fallen asleep on the rug, using one of the couch cushions as a pillow. Judging from the stitching, it was the work of Salvatore’s departed wife, a mousy little woman Primo barely remembered, because she hadn’t lasted long working the farm before some winter wind had blown her away like a leaf. “It’s clearer than in Rome. Do you go to church?”

“Do you?” Primo asked, to parrot him maybe, but also out of genuine curiosity. He’d been too drunk the night before, tired and wired, to remember to return Paul to the lighter. Now he considered the boy’s sleepy-eyed stare, his hair mussed with sleep, and for the first time he wondered what Paul was, exactly. A creature who lived in a lighter and could grant wishes, but who shovelled pasta in his mouth like a man starved, who slept curled up on the floor like a tired and slightly frightened child.

“My family’s never been big on religion,” Paul shrugged.

“You can’t grow outside of religion here. Religion and family ties. It’s what keeps you alive, more than bread or water... I’ve decided what I want you to do for me.”

“Oh yeah?” Paul sat up, intrigued. “Maybe it’ll have to wait an hour or two because I’m still coming down from the coke from last night. What is it?”

“It’s time I take over the business. My uncle is an old fool. It’ll be easier if you get rid of him for me.”

Paul paled.

“Oh no man, I don’t do that. I mean. I don’t kill people.”

Primo raised his eyebrows. “You’re saying it’s against the rules?”

Paul shook his head.

“I just won’t do it.”

“Well then,” Primo said, careless of how spiteful he sounded, and flicked the lighter.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**8.**

  
The old Romans who’d had the lighter last had used up their wishes in the span of two days, but they didn’t get rid of the lighter after that. Sometimes, they would retrieve it from the drawer of an ornate writing desk, and conjure up their genie in the middle of their living room. On such occasions Fabio and Gina would dress to the nines and feed Paul sweets and chocolate in delicate wrappings. They’d have him play cards with them and sometimes he’d be allowed a glass of brandy. They’d have long conversations with him, Paul twisting the subjects around so they’d believe he was more knowledgeable than he actually was, rambling away about Carthaginian artefacts buried in Moroccan deserts, about Caravaggio’s angry saints, about oil rigs in the North Sea named after Scottish folk heroes, about ways in which one might pretend to stab a man and make it look real, about the right tone and words one might use to approach a rock star, an artist, or the President of the United States. Things he’d learned in his sixteen years of life, when they expected a knowledge accumulated over centuries or millennia spent trapped inside a lighter, or a lamp, or a teapot, or whatever other objects genies became tied to. If the genie who’d tricked Paul was to be believed, there was a genie in Marseille tied to a brick, and another in Buenos Aires who lived inside a die and would only come out if you rolled the right number. 

Paul had spent his seventeenth birthday playing checkers with Fabio and Gina, wearing the jeans and t-shirt and that thin, sparkly cardigan he’d had on the day he made the ill-fated wish to swap places with the lighter’s former genie. They’d plied him with brandy and Gina had asked him if he was happy.

Paul could have told them he wasn’t, that those occasional glimpses of their crowded living-room, gilded furniture and frames and glossy plants, leather spines on dusty bookshelves that might as well have been fake, like they sometimes were on movie sets; rugs with complicated patterns - floral labyrinths that put your heart in your throat after the third glass of brandy; the ancient gramophone that never played anything but opera, the fire in the hearth with its grate shaped like serpents, they weren’t a pleasant diversion from being stuck inside a lighter, but rather a reminder of his powerlessness, condemned to entertain these old people until they’d had enough and decided to return him to his prison - or until they died and Paul was sold off at an auction somewhere, passed on to the next rich person whose first wish would undoubtedly be to be made richer.

Falling into the hands of Fabio and Gina’s burglar and murderer was about the last thing Paul would have expected, but then again, his life hadn’t exactly been going according to plan in the past year.

Inside the lighter Paul wasn’t exactly awake. Time folded in on itself so long stretches of it could go by without him noticing, although sometimes he would make up stories to entertain himself, or recite the plot of his favorite movies, or wonder what his girlfriend might be up to. Lately, he’d taken to drifting off until he was jolted awake by a sudden clear memory of the burglar’s blue eyes.

“I’m not murdering anyone,” Paul said, though there was no one there to hear him, nothing but the disturbing echo of his own words, bouncing back at him in a myriad languages, the spoken tongues of every single person who’d had the lighter since the curse had first been placed upon it.  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**9.**

The lamp on the table was still facing away from him and towards the wall, where the boy’s hand had pushed it so the light would provide a starker backdrop to the movements of his hands. In the past fourteen days since Primo had last ignited the lighter, he had left the living-room exactly as it had been on the morning when he’d argued with Paul about his uncle’s murder: the lamp angled towards the wall, the empty glass that the genie had drunk from, with the smudged imprint of his lips still visible on the side, tangled fringes along the edge of the rug where the boy had nervously twisted them between his fingers. Primo ran his hand across the table, over faint smudges of coke. The night they’d arrived he’d tipped some onto his finger and told the genie to open his mouth. Something about feeding him drugs had amused him, although it had been a vicious sort of pleasure. As if he’d gone to the nearby church and caught a statue of the Madonna by a sleeve of her blue coat, and dragged her home to lie in bed beside him.

The money he’d given to his uncle had been used to buy several businesses along the coast. Nothing that would require extensive work, only shops that already existed and could readily be refitted to suit the needs of their growing enterprise: from the front they’d continue to be laundromats and beauty parlours and car dealerships, sound money laundering businesses; meanwhile, they’d receive and repackage shipments of cocaine through the back door, before they made their way north to be sold across Europe. Overall, it wasn’t a bad plan, but it wouldn’t take them very far, as Primo had told Leonardo when his uncle and his uncle’s accountant decided to pay him a visit in the hope of meeting his elusive genie. They were still treading water.

“With the money you made us, we could all retire right now and live like princes,” Salvatore had said. “And we will. Now it’s about deciding how much of it we want to share with the rest of Calabria. That’s what the businesses are for. We can’t go around telling people you have a fucking magic car that fills our pockets with dollar bills.”

“We have to be cautious,” Leonardo had added. “You don’t know that the money will keep appearing whenever we want it to. Was this what you asked for? An endless supply of cash?”

Primo had rolled his eyes at him before he answered. “I said I wanted to be richer than the richest man in the world.”

“Well then. Here you go.” Leonardo shrugged. “I’d assume the money will stop flowing whenever you’ve become the richest man in the world.”

Primo had refused to conjure up the genie, but he could tell his uncle was growing tired of his excuses, and soon enough the endless supply of dollar bills would stop being a distraction. Salvatore would turn back to Primo with the appetite of a man who’d known enough lean winters to never be fully satiated; if there were more wonders to be had out of the boy, he’d have them. Primo had weighed his options on the first drive back from Rome with the lighter in his pocket: obey centuries’ worth of traditions by letting his uncle decide the fate of Calabria on his own, or make use of this golden opportunity to give himself a future that might benefit the mountainous country that had brought him into the world.

When the flame sprang from the lighter, the boy seemed to tumble out of thin air, landing on his ass on the rumpled rug. He looked drowsy, but wary, his blue eyes flickering between Primo’s blank expression and the lighter in his hand. Primo lit a cigarette from the flame and handed it to him. The boy took it.

“Well,” Primo asked. “Have you changed your mind?”

  
  
  
  


**10.**

Primo had met Piera when they’d spent an afternoon waiting for Salvatore together at his farm, smoking shoulder to shoulder outside the front door, desperate for a breath of air away from the dark and dank interior but wary of the cold. Primo had rubbed the prostitute’s back as they clutched their cigarettes and stomped their feet on the frosty ground. Piera had come over to fuck Salvatore and make enough money to feed her son over the next couple of weeks; Primo had had a scheme he wanted to propose to his uncle after his father had turned it down. Piera had got her money, Primo had got a sound thrashing when he got back to the house and found out that Salvatore had called his father the moment he left the farm. He’d figured the odds were even, Salvatore would either rat him out or be taken by the genius of his plan, which involved blackmailing a judge to provide them with some legal cover. Much like his brother however, Salvatore had summarily decided Primo’s plan was “fucking bullshit.” Primo had shelved the outline of it. He’d kept in touch with Piera.

“He’s dead,” she whispered down the line.

Primo didn’t stop to wonder how risky it was for her to make that call straight from Salvatore’s house, on Salvatore’s own phone. In that moment, it was impossible to be anything but jubilant, to hell with the consequences.

“How?”

“In his sleep. Primo, I swear I didn’t do anything. I was about to leave, I thought he was asleep, but something didn’t seem right, and I…”

“Don’t worry about it. Get yourself home, I’ll take care of this. I’ll have someone pay you,” he added, an afterthought, before he put the phone down. Piera could get herself a new house or a new life if she wanted, there’d be no more waiting around on Salvatore for either of them.

“Did it work?”

He’d almost forgotten about Paul, who stood on the threshold twisting the sleeves of that ridiculous cardigan between his fingers. _You cast a long shadow,_ Primo thought, as he strode forward and kissed the boy on both cheeks.

“Yes. And now I can work, miracle boy. You’ve handed me the keys to the kingdom.”

Paul smiled at the praise and for a second Primo toyed with the idea of kissing his beautiful mouth. What would it be like to take him to bed, he wondered, a creature that wasn’t quite human, that could crown him and drown him in riches with a snap of its long fingers? He’d never had much interest in sex beyond the fulfilment of some passing, imperious need, something to be dealt with quickly and half-forgotten afterwards, but maybe it would be different with Paul. A forbidden taste of the sacred.

“Maybe we could celebrate?” Paul ventured, his voice fractured by what must have been the expectation of another night spent inside the lighter.

Primo shook his head, taking a step back.

“There’s too much to do. I need allies. I have to move in now or I’ll lose the advantage.” He shrugged, “Later, maybe,” and turned away from the boy’s crestfallen face, as he reached inside his pocket for the lighter.

  
  
  
  
  


**11.**

For all his feigned indifference, Primo kept track of the changes in Leonardo’s expression: from his initial surprise at finding Primo in his kitchen at 2 in the morning, to the usual mixture of exasperation and long-suffering patience he usually reserved for him, the behaviour one adopts around a favoured but troubled child, to acute worry when Primo told him Salvatore was dead, and finally, a reluctant but genuine flicker of interest once Primo began to expose his plan.

“A port,” Leonardo repeated, taking a sip of the whiskey Primo had poured for him out of Leonardo’s own stores.

Primo tapped the map he’d brought: that wide, empty expanse of sea, blue square upon blue square of future shipping lanes and million-dollar cargo.

“You know the best part? Since we’re a Regeneration Zone, we’ll do it with the full support of the government.”

Leonardo only had the one bottle of whiskey, but he also had a few bottles of some cloudy, homemade limoncello that they put a dent in as they considered their next steps. Having come this far, Primo relished being able to talk out the particulars with someone else. Leonardo and him might not agree on much on a good day, but he did trust his good sense, and Leonardo had a better grasp of the workings of most institutions that would enable them to get away with bribes where Primo would have started shooting on instinct. He could learn how to manipulate people better, he was more than willing to do so. In the meantime however, he would chase his newfound good spirits at the bottom of that bottle of liquor.

Leonardo stumbled back to his wife’s bed in the striped pyjamas he’d been wearing throughout this impromptu house call, and Primo stumbled back to his parents’ house, humming to himself. 

“Wine?” he offered, once the boy had appeared in the middle of the living room, the setting tinged with a newfound familiarity, as if Paul had reinvented the house Primo had grown up in, reshaped it so it’d better set off his red hair, so the shadows would soften the angles of his long limbs and the planes of his long face. Paul accepted a glass with a tentative smile. They sat side by side on the rug, with their backs to the couch, the table shoved out of the way. Primo had been in no state to sit anywhere else when he’d returned. For a moment he’d considered driving off into the mountains until exhaustion caught up with him and snuffed out his good mood, at which point he’d have parked the car on the side of the road and collapsed on the wheel. He’d remembered there was a bottle of wine under the front seat, however, and it had seemed like a shame to drink it on his own. In many ways besides, the boy was better company than Leonardo. Funnier and less uptight, and far more pleasant to look at than a dour, middle-aged Calabrian man.

“You can bless the first stone we’ll set down in the port,” Primo told the boy, with a lopsided grin. “My lucky charm.”

“Your uncle might have been an asshole, but that doesn’t mean I enjoyed killing him,” Paul muttered, mulishly.

“Did you really kill him? How does it work? Is it like extinguishing a flame?” Primo caught Paul’s hand where it rested on the boy’s knee. “Did you do it with those fingers? Here. Show me.”

Paul pulled his hand away, fear in his pale blue eyes. “Can I go outside?” He blustered. “Just for a walk. Can I go take a walk outside?”

Primo threw his hands up. “Suit yourself,” he said, and returned to his wine.

  
  
  


**12.**

Paul wasn’t sure what time it could have been. Late. The stars were out and as he left the main street and followed a narrow lane away from the centre of the village, he heard an owl cry out from the eaves of a house. A cat slinked in the funnel of shadows between two beams of moonlight. What would happen, if he kept walking?

He had a faint idea, because he’d tried to run away from Fabio and Gina once. They’d fallen asleep before they remembered to imprison him again, and he’d tiptoed out of the living-room and down those marble stairs where he would meet the burglar, several months later. The front door was locked, but he’d scaled the garden wall without too much trouble. Before he’d made it down the cobbled street, however, before he’d even started running, his chest had begun to ache, a persistent burn like a hand relentlessly against a bruise. By the time he reached the next street junction he could barely breathe. Whatever would have happened after that, he didn’t get to find out. One of the old Romans must have woken up and realised their mistake, for within seconds he was trapped in the lighter again. Relieved that the pain had vanished, although he’d come to regret it, later, especially once he’d forgotten the exact shape and depth of it - couldn’t he have borne it, if he’d kept walking? Maybe it would have faded eventually. Maybe it would have killed him. Paul didn’t want to die, but sometimes that half-sleep in a dark place that smelled like oil and the aftermath of a fire seemed a fate worse than death.

The burglar’s village was silent and dark, with neither street lamps nor any lights inside the houses. The village might as well have been empty, and yet Paul couldn’t help but think that there were eyes following him. People standing inside dark rooms, peering outside their windows. A momentary change in the texture of the shadows at the end of a street. All of a sudden he felt - not scared, but rather - unbearably lonely. He remembered the burglar’s strong grip on his hand, _Here, show me._ In Rome, Paul had slept with everyone who would have him, and then he’d decided to sleep only with the one girl, until they’d run up a debt with some unsavoury people and he’d had to run off. He wondered what Martine might be up to, if she was still living in the large and largely insalubrious ground-floor apartment that the four of them used to share, Martine and her twin sister and Paul and an Italian boy called Marcello, living out of each other’s pockets, sharing each other’s beds and food and clothes and one-night-stands, what money they made from their artistic endeavours, Paul selling handmade jewellery to tourists on the Piazza Navona, Marcello drawing their cartoonish portraits. When they had coke they shared it, too. That had been the origin of the damn debt.

Paul’s breath grew shorter as he approached the edge of the village, barefoot on the uneven road. By the time he reached the bottom of the ravine and the churning river, the village perched high above him like some medieval fortress carved straight out of the rock, he could barely breathe. Of course there was a catch; it would have been too easy if he could just up and leave. He tried to take another few steps and collapsed against the low stone wall separating the road from the river below it. Leaving aside the rest, the coke and the lighter and Fabio and Gina lying dead on a Persian rug they’d bought with the money Paul had conjured up for them… He’d killed someone, hadn’t he? It didn’t matter if the burglar’s uncle was a bad person. Paul knew that he was, he’d felt something of the man’s anger when he’d died, a flare of self-importance, _I rule this village and you think you can touch me?_ But Paul hadn’t had to touch him. He’d only had to want him dead, and in the end, he had wanted it, what was this man’s life against his, against his sanity? An old don who’d worn his crown for too long, that Paul could snatch off his head as easily as that, to set it atop the burglar’s dark hair. _Between Scylla and Charybdis,_ as the saying went, doubly fitting in this instance, since the two monsters were supposed to have lived in the Straits of Messina.

Paul waited a moment longer, and when he could tell he was about to pass out, he pulled himself up, and began to walk back towards the village. 

He expected the burglar to be waiting for him, lighter at the ready, but he was no longer in the living-room. Paul picked his way around the empty bottle and glasses, one of which had rolled onto the carpet. The burglar he found in a bedroom on the first floor, seemingly asleep, although he opened his eyes when Paul appeared in the doorway. On the nightstand, the lighter glinted bluish in the moonlight. The burglar made no motion to pick it up, however. Once he’d ascertained that the figure watching him was Paul, he merely rolled away from the door, his body dragging the covers along as he did so, baring the other side of the bed. Maybe it wasn’t an invitation, but Paul would gladly take it as such. He removed his cardigan and folded it on the back of a chair, figuring it would give the burglar some time to change his mind. When he didn’t stir, Paul padded along quietly to the bed, and slipped under the covers.

  
  
  


**13.  
**

Paul hadn’t spent a night in bed in almost a year. As the burglar slept off what must have been copious amounts of alcohol, considering he’d already been drunk by the time he’d arrived at the house, Paul stretched and rearranged his long limbs, arms wrapped around a pillow, smiling contentedly at the rays of sunlight slipping in through the shutters. _He’s a dangerous criminal,_ Paul thought as the burglar began to stir, rolling over so that he was facing Paul once again. A dangerous criminal who lived in a poor village, little stone houses piled up on top of a hill, surrounded by a rocky wilderness, who drove a dusty Alfa Romeo that had seen better days, whose house looked like it had been decorated by someone’s Italian grandmother, but who’d somehow developed a stark fashion sense for himself, tight-fitting shirts with discrete patterns, flared trousers that showed off his ass, the sort of man Paul would have stared at unabashedly if they’d been at the _Treetops_ nightclub in Rome and there was coke on the table. The dark moustache gave him a sleazy air, for sure, but in Rome Paul wouldn’t have cared, and the burglar also had a fine mouth, a sharp jawline and piercing blue eyes, the sort of face that High Renaissance artists would readily have painted. _Portrait of a Young Man With Pistol._ Centuries later that same portrait would have ended up on the cover of an edition of Machiavelli’s _Principe._

Paul didn’t think before he leaned in and kissed him. Maybe it was a hunch, maybe one of his instincts for self-sabotage. Maybe he just wanted to be kissed. 

To his surprise, the burglar did not immediately pull back. Instead he wrapped his hand around the back of Paul’s head, his knee nudging apart Paul’s thighs.

Paul had had hasty sex with some rough-looking guy in the bathroom of a club once, out of curiosity and because he’d made a bet with Marcello that he could get the guy to follow him, although he hadn’t really thought he’d live up to his menacing appearance. They were, after all, at a very exclusive venue. The sex had been brutal, he’d limped home with an arm slung over Marcello’s shoulder and had spent the next day in bed, drinking whenever he woke up to forget the parts of it that hadn’t been arousing but plainly ridiculous, the kind of talk that had made him laugh out loud before the man had clocked him in the jaw. A restless, reckless part of him expected a similar experience this time around. There hadn’t been a single moment in the past year that hadn’t felt like punishment, after all. Wasn’t it the way those wishes worked - this entire curse - that you could get what you wanted, but at a painful cost?

It was somewhat painful, but in the way rushed sex couldn’t fail to be painful, and the man did use his fingers beforehand, for which Paul was grateful. The both of them were still drowsy with sleep and alcohol, and the setting made for a strange intimacy. It was easy to get carried away, to ascribe meaning to gestures that must not have had any beyond a vague impulse born of opportunity.

“Jesus, that was good,” Paul mumbled into his pillow, several hours later, after they’d fucked and fallen asleep and woken up to fuck again. He gladly tilted his head back when the burglar presented him with a bump of coke. “Is this something you do often?” he asked, once he was done wiping white powder off his nose. “Fucking genies, I mean.” Maybe if he got him to talk, he reasoned - maybe if he managed to get a smile out of him - the man would want to keep him around a moment longer.

“I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.” The burglar walked over to an old dresser, kicking Paul’s discarded jeans aside. “Here.” He tossed him a shirt and a pair of trousers. “Get dressed, you’re coming with me.” With his back to Paul as he rummaged inside the dresser - Paul’s eyes lingering on his ass - he went still for a second.

“Primo,” he said, as if he was answering a question Paul had only just asked him.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**14.**  
  


In a way, it was sweet that Primo had wanted to take him to the beach, Paul supposed, even if the beach in question was just a muddy shore six feet wide running along the bottom of a steep ditch. He walked to the edge of the sea and let the water lap at his bare feet.

“The first contractors arrive tomorrow,” Primo told him, his blue eyes set on the grey horizon, his booted feet firmly planted in the sand. The dark blue shirt Primo wore under his leather jacket was familiar; Paul recognised it from the night they’d met. The trousers Primo had lent him were slightly too big for him, so he’d borrowed a belt as well. It felt strange, walking around in someone else’s clothes. As if he’d tried on Primo’s life for a moment. Predictably, it didn’t fit him. In the car on the way there, Primo had told him about the port he was going to build, how he’d import cocaine from South America, make a space for himself in what until now had been a Sicilian market.

Before he fucked off to wherever Paul couldn’t find him, the last thing the previous genie had told him was, _The only people who make those three wishes and end up better off than when they found the lighter are those who use it to further their goals, not to serve some poorly thought-out idea of what happiness or success or even revenge might be like._ Paul had been drunk at the time, and ready to make the wish that would seal his fate. He hadn’t paid much attention to what the genie was saying, but memory worked in strange ways sometimes, and for better or for worse, this final tirade had stuck with him.

“What will you do with me, once you’re done with your wishes?” Paul asked.

Since they’d had sex, Primo had been surprisingly companionable. He’d sung in the car on the way to the beach, and once they were there, he watched Paul walk into the sea and splash around until he had water up to his knees, with an expression Paul could only have described as thoughtful. Now he searched his pockets for cigarettes, and handed one over before Paul had even thought to ask for it.

“What am I supposed to do?” he asked.

“Well, you could pass me on to someone else, I suppose,” Paul shrugged. “Then I’d have to grant their wishes. Or… You could keep me with you, maybe. I don’t know much about ports but I guess I could… Fill paperwork for you, or something.”

Primo gave him a dubious look.

“Is that what you want?” 

Paul ran a hand through his tangled curls. “It’s hard to know what you’ll want for life, right? I wanted to be an archaeologist, but also a painter... Sometimes there’s nothing in the world I want more than coke, sometimes it’s sex. I used to think I wanted to spend my life with this girl… Martine. She’s the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen. I tried to wish for that, but it turns out it’s the one thing you can’t wish for. You can wish for someone’s death, but not for them to fall in love with you. I guess it would cheapen it.” 

For months on end he’d yearned for a glimpse of the world outside his prison. He’d dreamt of running back to Rome, to the drafty flat with its throw rugs and his photographs and drawings pinned to the walls, its empty fridge and his Vespa parked outside the front door - the flat was a short ride away from his mother’s. Once it had become clear he was trapped with no means of escape, he’d tried not to think of her at all. And though he did fantasize about giving her a call sometimes, he was starting to think he might have travelled too far for there to be an easy way back. If he did manage to call her, the right and selfless thing to say, the only thing he might be able to get across would be a lie. _I’m fine. Don’t look for me._ Had she, he wondered?

“It’s what I want, right now,” he told Primo. “Sometimes it’s coke, sometimes it’s sex. Right now it’s you. But who cares, right? Turns out there’s no difference if you’re a kid whose parents are getting a divorce, or a guy in love with a beautiful girl, or a genie stuck in some dumb lighter. What I want never matters.” 

  
  
  
  
  


**15.  
**

Primo had never been one for distractions. Whether he was robbing a house at gunpoint or buying the most expensive bottle in the village bar and insisting every patron in attendance had a drink with him, there was a reason for his actions. Some protracted goal. Power by way of money, loyalty, the relentless acquisition of information by any means necessary. Violence if it was needed - and violence in the spur of the moment sometimes, inevitable, like sex could be inevitable, some primal need he had no other way to resolve than to briefly give in to it. The coke itself had only ever been another way to stitch together too many trails of thought, to turn his sleeplessness into frantic focus.

The genie was a distraction. On a day filled with various obligations, a meeting with Leonardo about the trucks they intended to buy and the people they needed to scare to become the sole providers of construction materials at the Gioia Tauro steel plants, an appointment at the church to oversee the organisation of his uncle’s funeral, an invitation to share an old lady’s lunch, impossible to rescind because the old lady controlled her departed husband’s olive oil business, and had some experience of container ports and an extensive knowledge of the many ways in which port authorities could be bribed and swindled and otherwise incapacitated, a meeting with another _‘ndrina_ , a family from the Gioia Tauro _plano_ who’d expressed interest in “walking with you, Don Primo, pooling together our resources for the greater good of our people,” though it was too early to tell if they meant money, infrastructure or maybe the hand of a daughter in marriage, Primo found his attention wandering, his hand going to the lighter in the pocket of his leather jacket. Thoughts of the morning light entangling itself in the boy’s hair, of the boy’s hands clutching his back, of how good it had felt to thrust into him, the very human sounds Paul had made, his breath catching on every exhale. A genie who breathed, with freckles all over his shoulders and across the bridge of his nose, the sharp angle of a scar on his ankle, who’d cried out _Jesus_ when he came, pulling hard on Primo’s hair. Not so much a genie, after all, as a boy in a lighter, and for once in his life Primo wondered if he might not try to keep something he’d stolen, instead of exchanging it for cash or favours.

The meeting with the Ricci family had gone well enough, though it had required some stern negotiating. Primo was still complaining about it in the car on the way back, that tedious dance of pretending they were going to give in to Carlo Ricci’s excessive ambitions only to pull the rug out from under him at the end, walking away with entries in the regional government and a number of warehouses in Milan in exchange for a promise that they’d consider (and not necessarily commit to) giving him a share of the port’s profits.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Leonardo said, with some relief, when Primo dropped him off at his house. Primo could see Leonardo’s wife looking down at them from her kitchen window. Regina had never treated Primo as if he was anything else but bad news, not even when he was a kid, but he couldn’t exactly fault her for that.

“We could take your son tomorrow.” Primo felt generous all of a sudden, although he couldn’t have said who he was trying to ingratiate himself with, Leonardo or his disapproving wife or their colourless son. “Teach him something.” Tucking a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, he reached for his other lighter, the one that wouldn’t manifest a genie the moment he lit it up. 

Neither lighter was in his pocket. Instead he found a hole, the seams ripped apart where the weight of the lighter had torn the pocket open.

Leonardo had been about to walk away from the car, but he doubled back towards Primo’s rolled down window when he saw him frantically search through his pockets, cursing between his teeth.

“What is it?”

Primo didn’t answer, but he threw open the door, and began to search the car.

**16.  
**

Paul had expected to appear in Primo’s living-room once again - or, rather, the living-room of the house that Primo occupied, with its old-fashioned decor that didn’t quite match Primo’s appearance or his simmering energy. Instead, he seemed to have been conjured up in a forest, a place of tall naked pines and fractured rocks. As for the boy in front of him, with his ill-fitting short-sleeved shirt, his head of thick dark curls and his large glasses, he looked like the kind of boy someone like Primo would have mercilessly picked on at school. And yet, there he was, holding the lighter. Paul sighed.

“I’m a genie. You get three wishes from me, which I’ll have to grant whether I want to or not, and then you can… pass me on to someone else, I guess.”

“How… Where did you…”

Paul realised abruptly that it had been months since he’d spoken to someone his own age. The old Romans had been, well, old. As for Primo, he must have been in his early thirties, but his behaviour oscillated so wildly between moments of immaturity, holding food and coke away from Paul’s hands because it amused him, staring at Paul’s shadow puppet display with rapt fascination - and chilling displays of cruelty and violence, killing Fabio and Gina or ordering his uncle’s murder, that Paul would have been at a loss to give him an age. He found himself smiling in unexpected relief.

“Angelo. Angelo Calati,” the boy ventured, as if Paul’s smile had got the better of his fears.

“Nice to meet you, Angelo. I’m Paul.”

For most of his life, Paul had resented his last name, a legacy of money and self-entitlement, of a very superficial understanding of the meaning of art and love and companionship, the lot of it doused in gasoline. It had been a while since he’d thought to share it with anyone, but something about the boy’s manner almost convinced him to do so. _My family would pay to have me back._ Why would anyone accept that sort of bargain, however, with those three wishes in the balance? Paul would have lied about those if it had been an option, but whenever he was first called out of the lighter, the truth of his predicament seemed to force its way past his lips. 

“Where did you find me? The lighter I mean. Where did you find the lighter?”

“On my way up here. Someone must have dropped it. Am I… Should I get you back to your… your rightful owner?”

Maybe it was Angelo’s choice of words that made him hesitate, this assumption of ownership. Paul grimaced. 

“You found me. I’m yours.” 

Whatever mixed feelings he had about that, whatever memories of being fucked six ways from Sunday by a Molotov cocktail of a man with piercing blue eyes, he shoved them aside.

“You’re pulling my leg, right? About those wishes.”

“How about you try it out?” Paul drawled.

“Could you take me somewhere?” The naked hope on Angelo’s face was at once eerily familiar, an echo of Paul’s enthusiasm when he’d first found the lighter, and different in nature, as if for Angelo, those wishes were a matter of life and death. They hadn’t been for Paul, not at the time, despite those debts he needed cleared and the threat of the mob coming to collect them. He used to think he was invincible. At first, the wishes had been little more than a game. 

“Could you take me to Rome?” Angelo asked.

**17.  
**

Angelo had expressed an interest in going dancing and Paul had tried not to sound too hopeful when he’d said, _I know a place. Treetops. A lot of celebrities go there, or they used to. When the Stones were in Rome, they went every night. I’m not making this up, me and Martine we..._

 _“The Stones?”_ Angelo had repeated. _“Really? Can we go there?”_

Paul didn’t mention that at the time, he’d been something of a celebrity himself. _The Golden Hippie,_ they used to call him, of the flaming hair and the no less flamboyant antics. Even after a year, that still meant something, because the bouncer let him and Angelo walk in without question, in spite of their ridiculous clothing.

To be fair, Paul hadn’t dressed any better at the time. He’d left his mother’s Roman apartment with the one pair of jeans and had never seemed to scrounge up enough money to buy a second one. The four of them had a tendency to blow what money they made during the day from selling Paul’s paintings and Marcello’s caricatures; they’d spend it on wine and cocktails and coke at places like _Treetops_ , places that Paul could get them into by wielding the last name that he so professed to despise, because he’d grown used to exclusive venues, to rubbing elbows with celebrities who’d touch his hair and kiss him on the mouth if his smile was enticing enough. For a long time, naively, Paul had even thought they were getting the coke for free.

Angelo was suitably impressed by _Treetops_ , although in Paul’s enlightened opinion it was somewhat past its prime. The crowd was thicker than it had been a year ago and more varied, full of young people most of which were Italian. Paul recognised one of the waitresses and charmed a couple drinks out of her as if no time had passed at all, slipping back into his role as Rome’s prodigal American son, tousled hair crowned in neon, delivering an earnest rant about the freedom that art provided when you only ever painted what you loved, even though he hadn’t painted anything in a year and would have had trouble defining what exactly it was that he loved.

“Your mother has been looking for you everywhere,” the waitress told him, in English, and though she had to shout to be heard her voice was kind. “She came here several times.”

“I’ll make sure to give her a call,” Paul shouted back, relieved to be drunk and unable to summon the necessary amount of gravitas for that conversation.

He was on his way to join Angelo on the dance floor when he felt a hand on his arm, and recognised the slender hand as well as the lovely face, dark eyebrows, dark eyes, long dark curls and a dress she must either have found in an attic or in some fashionable creator’s shop in her German homeland. As often with the twins, he was able to tell them apart by a faint shift in their expressions: Jutta had always been angrier than her more reserved sister. It was the reason why Paul had flirted with Martine from the get go. Jutta had always seen right through him and consequently, she’d never liked him.

“Are you kidding me?” Jutta shouted, dragging him back to the bar, her fingers digging hard into his arm. “Where the hell have you been?”

They’d lived together for months before Paul made his bargain with the genie, long enough that he’d drunkenly fallen onto the wrong mattress sometimes, and Jutta had been so drunk herself that she’d held him instead of kicking him out. As far as knowing people went, Paul supposed there was something to be said about accumulating a joint debt towards a restaurant owner who supplemented his income by selling coke to his customers. When the time had come to pay back the debt in question, Marcello had disappeared to the seaside, one of their dealer’s men had locked both girls inside their flat and Paul had been sent to beg his grandfather for money.

“You _left_ us,” Jutta reminded Paul, staring hard at him. “Berto’s men tried to…”

“I didn’t have a choice,” Paul protested. “But I cleared the debt. It was the first thing I asked the… It was the first thing I did when I came back to Rome. Where is Martine?”

“Why, you intend to pick up where you left off?” Jutta snapped. “We thought Berto had killed you and you were dead in a ditch somewhere. Martine cried about it. But that was months ago, Paul. We’ve moved on.”

Paul shook his head. In fact, he wasn’t even sure he wanted to see Martine, after everything, although he didn’t blame her, or Jutta, or Marcello, for opening a line of credit with drug dealers in his name without thinking to ask him about it first, for treating his earnestness and the professions of love he’d addressed to all three of them at various times like they were an endearing quirk rather than valuable offerings or the basis of a way of life, for moving on with their lives, while he was doused in oil and trapped in a silver prison. If Paul had had a say in who should get the lighter, he wouldn’t have picked any of his former friends, much as he’d loved them, and much as he loved them still.

“I just wanted to make sure you were alright,” he explained, but Jutta just glared at him and disappeared back into the crowd, taking the remnants of his past life with her.

**18.**

In truth, if Paul had had a say in who should get the lighter, he wasn’t sure what kind of person he’d have chosen. As his mother’s adored first-born, he’d been allowed to grow up selfish, but even then he wouldn’t have tricked someone in order to save himself, like the previous genie had tricked him. If he’d really had to choose, maybe he’d have picked someone like Angelo. A good person who’d never had anything, who was perhaps the most deserving of being granted anything they wanted for a time.

“This was amazing,” Angelo said, as they staggered out of the club in the early hours of the morning, arm in arm. Angelo stared at the fountains and buildings as if he’d never seen a city in his life, although he made a point to tell Paul that “I studied in Naples, but this is different, there’s something rich and ancient about Rome, isn’t it? The cities in the south, they fall asleep among their own ruins. Everything deteriorates and one day it’ll be gone. It’s just… refuse in fifteen century courtyards and chicken coops built into the side of gutted castle towers, you know? But here, the ruins still have a life of their own. They still speak of old power. I’m not… I’m not making sense, am I?”

“No, no, I think you do. When I lived here, what used to really fuck me up was, how old everything is. The art and the architecture. It makes you feel like you haven’t lived at all, and also that you’ll never really get to, compared to, say, a beautiful painting of a saint. A statue of some angel pissing into a fountain. I’d look at all the art, I know someone at the Farnese and sometimes I’d just go in and sleep at the foot of this painting of Saint John that my grandfather showed to me when I was a kid, and I really… I really wanted to be that painting, man. Admired and preserved for all eternity. But I was just some dumb kid.”

“You lived in Rome?” Angelo slowed his step. “Wait, how old are you, exactly?”

If Angelo had asked him hours earlier, maybe Paul would have lied, but by now he was drunk and tired, and the doors to the Farnese were closed to him, as were the doors to his former apartment, to the sunken mattress he used to share with Martine; as were the doors of his mother’s apartment, which he could have walked to in under ten minutes, _Hello, it’s Paul, I changed my mind about running away, I’ll live with you and your asshole of a boyfriend after all;_ as were the doors to some distant house in Calabria, where he’d have slept like the dead and woken up to the warm body of a man in bed beside him, his face tucked against Primo’s neck, nuzzling his nape, _Stop this,_ Primo had said, and when Paul hadn’t stopped he’d turned around and made him, with a hand around his neck and the other between his legs.

“Seventeen,” he said, and looked away from the horror in Angelo’s eyes, afraid of the knot in his throat. He’d cried, during the first week he’d spent in the lighter, unable yet to fall into that strange parody of sleep, like he’d learned to do afterwards. He’d cried himself raw and nobody had heard him, but now Angelo laid a careful hand on his arm, his brown eyes solemn as he asked, “Is there anything I can do? Is there a way I can help you?”

“Maybe,” Paul ventured. Saying it felt like hoisting himself up and over a wall that until then he’d thought was impossible to climb. “Maybe you could make your other wishes, and then you could bring me back to my mom? And she can try to… Free me, or something.”

“I will,” Angelo promises. “Of course I will. And I think I know what my two wishes will be. I want to go to New York, but not just to travel… I want to work there. Maybe you could make it so that a university offers me a scholarship to study literature, or something like that? I need to get away from here. Not Rome, I mean, but Calabria. Maybe… I don’t know what you want from life, but maybe when you’re free, you could come with me?”

“Maybe,” Paul agreed. Drunk on wine and hope in the middle of a little Roman piazza, it seemed like the best offer he’d ever received. Angelo sat down on the steps at the foot of a fountain, leaving space enough for Paul to sit beside him. 

“Can I ask what happened to you, genie?”

**19.**

Paul had run up a considerable debt in Rome. Coke and champagne, mostly, though it was unlikely he’d have got in much trouble for the champagne; the places where he used to dance and drink wouldn’t have sent armed men to his apartment to demand he repay his debts within the week or lose a few limbs. When he finally figured out that the coke didn’t just appear inside Marcello’s pockets, that he’d have to turn up the money to pay for it because, unbeknownst to him, that had been the plan all along, Marcello breezily telling his dealers that his rich friend, grandson of a billionaire, couldn’t fail to pay, never mind that Paul had run away from his family with little desire to come back begging for cash - he tried to go to his grandfather for help, and his grandfather looked at him knowingly and said, “A woman, I assume. You remind me of yourself at that age.”

Paul did love Martine, although maybe not quite as much as the rest of it, the wild Roman nights, the booze and the coke. A fact that had eventually surfaced, by way of a photoshoot Paul had done with the twins for _Playmen_ magazine where he’d posed in the nude, and alternatively wearing a t-shirt reading “Cocaine”. _Naked Hero_ , the brazen title went, although ultimately Paul didn’t think his grandfather had had that much of an issue with his lack of clothes. The old man had always had a zero drugs policy, a fact Paul could hardly hold against him when it had led his eldest son to commit suicide, and his second son, Paul’s father, to run his career into the ground. Paul’s grandfather had taken one look at the magazine and all his talk of “business propositions”, of lending Paul the money he needed in return for Paul coming back into the fold, went out the window.

“I had some money troubles,” Paul summarised. “Me and my girlfriend and some other guys, we partied with the wrong people in Rome, I owed them some money… My grandfather is rich.” In fact, many reliable sources indicated that Paul’s grandfather was the richest man in the world, although Paul wasn’t always sure he believed it. Were you really rich if you put all your money in a trust and only touched a fraction of it, if you counted every penny, if the only gifts you made came along with a high interest rate? “He wouldn’t lend me the money, and I needed a way to… I didn’t know what to do, and he lives in this manor, every object in it is a priceless artefact. Most of them he doesn’t even know he has. I figured I’d get something that was worth roughly what I owed.”

“You stole it,” Angelo said.

“It looked valuable,” Paul shrugged, tightening his arms around his knees. Behind them the fountain continued to flow. The light had begun to rise above the old stone façades. “I used to think I’d stolen it, but now I don’t know. Sometimes I think it has a life of its own, you know? Like how it got away from me, and then from Fabio and Gina… that’s the people who had it after me. And then… The guy who had it before you, he wouldn’t just have thrown it away. I still owed him a wish, he wouldn’t have wasted it. But here you are. Maybe it’s cursed, you know? It grants you wishes and then it fucks you over. Be careful with your last wish.”

“Do you know where he found it, your grandfather? Genies, they come from Islamic myths, right?”

“He used to travel more. But maybe he just bought it at an auction or something. Or someone gave it to him. And yeah, he’s the sort of guy who doesn’t,” Paul tried to adopt his grandfather’s pinched air, “believe in excess, he’d say, he doesn’t smoke… I’m sure he’s never used it.”

“Maybe you’re some sort of _genius loci_ ,” Angelo ventured. “A... spirit of the place, you know?”

“Maybe I would be, if I stayed long enough in one place to put down roots,” Paul mused. “Oh well. It doesn’t matter, yeah? We could… We could look into flights to New York, if you want.”

Angelo shook his head. “Not before I say goodbye to my grandmother. First, we have to go back to Calabria.” 

  
  


**20.**

They caught a train south, then hitched a ride in a passing truck, hopped onto a freight train and took two different buses. They finished on foot, as the bus that could have driven them the rest of the way only ran on Mondays. Angelo found the letter somewhere along the way, he might have had it in his pocket all along: an offer of a scholarship to study English at the Department of English and Comparative Literature of Columbia University. The letter said Angelo could apply for room and board on campus; it did not take into account Angelo’s lack of a passport. “We’ll figure it out _,”_ Angelo said. He wore his happiness like an ill-fitting shirt. Paul wondered when something good had last happened to him, and decided not to ask.

By the time they reached Angelo’s village it was the middle of the night, but they could see lights moving through the streets from a mile away. Music rose from the cluster of stone houses in the village’s centre. Angelo quickened his step. Paul had struggled with the walk from the last bus stop, acutely aware that he hadn’t had much occasion to exercise over the past year, although he couldn’t have said if the aches in his muscles were real or imagined. He’d gone weeks at a time without eating or drinking, with no visible consequences. Maybe he only felt tired because he knew that’s what he was supposed to feel - because it allowed him to pretend that he was still a live human boy, instead of whatever it was that he’d become.

“Wait,” he pleaded, as he came upon the first house. Up ahead, Angelo had reached an intersection. He turned and stopped. The street in front of him was full of light and life.

“There was a procession today,” Angelo called back as they forced their way through the crowd. The streets might have been chock-full of people and poorly lit by tired street lamps and all manners of lanterns, yet Paul still attracted attention, with his red curls, his pale androgynous beauty. People looked at him with curiosity, and often with wariness. “Here.” Angelo reappeared at Paul’s side and pulled him into the doorway of one of the houses. “My grandma lives upstairs. Can you wait for me here? I’ll tell her you’re a representative for the university, or something. We’ll figure it out. But she’s going to be worried that I didn’t come home last night and I need a moment to break the news to her, about New York. You can stay with us though. You can sleep in my mother’s bed… My grandmother is a great cook, you need to try her rosemary chicken. You can eat, right?”

All they’d consumed since the previous night had been alcohol. They’d had more than enough time to recover from their respective hangovers, but Angelo still seemed wired, delirious almost. They were both running on fumes, had been for a long time now. In a nearby street a woman began to sing, accompanied by drums and frantic strings and the lilt of a pipe. Paul turned towards the sound on instinct.

“Don’t wander off too far,” Angelo warned him. “We don’t really do strangers around here. You’re going to stand out. Maybe not right now, when everyone’s attention is elsewhere, but once the party’s over…”

“Sure man, I’ll be careful,” Paul said. He wouldn’t be able to go very far, anyways.

The singer held court in the village square, a stone’s throw away from the church, swaying along with the music under the dark limbs of a gnarled tree. The church was brightly lit, its doors thrown wide open, people in their best clothes talking on the steps. On the square near the woman and musicians, people were dancing, some village dance that Paul found delightfully quaint. He came a few steps closer - he had no intention to join the dancers, didn’t know the steps to this dance or, in fact, to any other dance, that was why he liked clubs, people didn’t mind so much if you moved like you were having a seizure, or at any rate, he was usually too drunk to care if they minded or not. What he wanted was to sit at the woman’s feet, to lean back against the tree and let the lights and dancers blur in front of his eyes. That was when he saw Primo - wearing a dark suit and tie, dancing as if he were trying to cast a spell on someone, with an odd menace to his fixed stare, to the dreamlike movements of his hands. Paul remained glued to the spot, wild-eyed - a deer caught in the headlights, if the deer had been full of an intense desire to kiss the car that was about to run him over.

**21.  
**

“My grandma says I should have invited you in, and that I’ve been a terrible host,” Angelo said, reappearing at Paul’s side. “You should come, she’s made nepitelle. They’ll be the best you’ve ever had, I promise.”

Paul, who had never had nepitelle in his life, couldn’t exactly disagree. Besides he was hungry, and he knew that he’d be in trouble if Primo saw him, or rather, Angelo would be. Yet he couldn’t seem to move. If he left, there was no saying he’d see Primo again. Paul was used to sleeping with people and for it to be momentary; not meaningless, exactly, but hardly momentous either, people finding each other, gripping each other tightly and moving on. There was no reason for it to be different this time, but that Primo was strange and lonely and a murderer, and Paul had looked into his blue eyes across several lines of coke and decided he wanted him. Sometimes, it was as easy as that.

“These wishes man, they’re such a bad joke,” he said bitterly. “I think it’s fucked up to think there’s anything you’re going to want your whole life.” 

“You’d have to be rich to say that.”

“Okay, no, that’s not what I meant. What I’m trying to say is… Maybe it’s okay to want things and not know if they will last?” He hesitated a second longer before he admitted, “I think I want to stay.”

“To stay,” Angelo repeated. “In Calabria,” as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing.

“Do you know that guy over there? With the red leather jacket.”

Angelo followed his gaze.

“That’s Primo. Primo Nizzuto. He used to be the don’s nephew, until the don died a couple days ago. Don Primo now, I guess. You don’t want to draw his attention to you, he’s… dangerous. Deranged, maybe. Are you sure about wanting to stay?”

Paul was sure in the way he was always sure about each and every one of his ideas: they made sense in the spur of the moment, he’d just have to pull them apart later to find out where he’d gone wrong, but even then, he wouldn’t have any regrets. It wasn’t in his nature.

“Well, then, I should free you, maybe.” Angelo smiled slightly at Paul’s surprise. “I was going to do it anyways, I’ve been thinking about it all day, but I thought I’d wait until we were in New York. If you’re decided on staying, though, I can...”

“Fuck,” Paul muttered.

Primo had turned in their direction - had seen them - was crossing the square. Gun at his hip, his hand resting on the grip. Another few seconds and Angelo would never get to make that third wish.

“Wish for New York,” Paul said hurriedly, grabbing him by the arm. “Wish for a long and satisfying life in New York and do it now. _Now._ Angelo!”

“This isn’t fair on you,” Angelo said, but he’d seen Primo walking towards them too, along with three or four other men who had detached themselves from their partners and from the long trestle tables laden with food to investigate the source of the disturbance. 

_It’s me,_ Paul thought. _I am the disturbance._

“ _Now_ ,” he urged again.

  
  
  


**22.**

One day she would leave Rome, move back to the States maybe, and the kids could go to college there and in some ways it would be like coming home, in some ways it would be like starting over. She didn’t feel ready though, not yet. There was still a chance Paul might reappear.

“He’s not a dog,” Lang had told her when she’d tried to explain that to him. “You don’t need to stay stuck in one place just because that’s the last place he knew where to find you, and you’re still hoping to see him show up on your doorstep, wagging his tail. He knows how to use a goddamn telephone, Gail. Your son’s a little jerk but he’s not stupid.”

That had been the final straw - the last row on the tail end of many other rows that had caused her to kick him out. She’d stopped short of blaming him for Paul’s disappearance. They’d never got along, Paul and Lang, not since Paul had been a child and she’d met Lang at one of those big Roman parties she sometimes got invited to alongside Paul’s father. Lang had seemed like a providential escape from her fast unraveling marriage, but Paul had no doubt paid the price of that. Her first child, the unspoken but blatant favourite, with his blazing red curls, who’d inherited her slender build, her long face, who held his cigarettes the same way she did, gently, almost, like he’d run off with his thoughts and left his daydreaming body behind.

That’s what Lang would say after Paul went missing, _He’s run off, it’s what he always does, he’s sleeping off his bender somewhere, with whoever he’s fucking at the moment, a girl, a boy, both at the same time, he’ll come back when he runs out of money, you just wait and see._

Gail had waited because she didn’t have much of a choice. Paul’s friends hadn’t been forthcoming, the elusive Marcello who’d moved out of the flat he used to share with Paul only days after Paul had disappeared, the twins who’d paid her a visit at first, asking if she’d heard from Paul, only to forgo their concerns later on, Jutta saying they had no idea where he might be, but that he might also be anywhere, that was Paul for you, always in motion, while Martine stared at the ground behind her sister, pulling her golden shawl around her. _Aren’t you worried about him?_ Gail had asked her. _This is your boyfriend. The man you love._ She hadn’t missed Jutta raising her eyebrows, whatever part of that plea she’d taken issue with. Maybe Paul and Martine had broken up and the girls wouldn’t tell her. Maybe Jutta just found the idea of Paul being called a man (sweet, irresponsible Paul) particularly amusing. Martine had remained silent.

“He told me he needed money,” she’d tried, a final time. “I gave him what I had, but I know he went to his grandfather afterwards, in London. The people you owed money to, could they have…”

“That debt is paid,” Jutta had shrugged. “Paul paid it with money he got in London. I’m sure he’s off enjoying the rest of it somewhere.”

Everyone kept telling her that Paul would come back, and in the meantime Gail woke up in the middle of the night from dreams where her golden-haired boy was trapped in a place that smelled strongly of petrol, clutching his knees as he stared blankly ahead. It was in the aftermath of one such dream that she walked quietly to the kitchen, determined not to wake up her other children, and found the mail on the table, brought in by her eldest daughter on her way home from an evening at the cinema. Gail sat at the table forgetting that she’d meant to pour herself a glass of water, drawn in by the familiar writing on the topmost envelope. It had been posted from New York, and bore a return address, to one Angelo Calati in Brooklyn. Inside, she found a heavy silver cigarette lighter, with a figure engraved on one side, a depiction of an angel or maybe of a young man, with curly hair down to his shoulders.

 _Cara mamma,_ the letter read. _I will tell you everything that happened to me, but first could you get yourself a cigarette, and light it using the silver lighter in the envelope?_

  
  


**23.**

“Where are we going?” Leonardo asked, not for the first time.

“What’s the matter with you? Is it your knees? I heard growing old was a pain.” Primo hardly slowed down, even though the slope had steepened and they were now climbing on uneven ground, protruding roots and knee-high weeds. “I hear fucking helps,” he offered. “Although knowing you, I assume your wife isn’t getting much of that, little lion.”

“Fuck off,” Leonardo told him, without putting much heat into it, maybe because he was out of breath. “Won’t you tell me where the fuck we’re going?”

“Where do you think?” Primo asked him, not without curiosity. “A hole in the ground, with bodies in it? An empty hole, waiting to be filled - with your body, maybe? Or a cliff that I could push you from?”

“That’s bullshit and we both know it. You need me.”

They had reached the edge of a wide plateau overlooking the sea. Primo stopped and turned back to look at him, blue eyes coolly calculating.

“I do. And for some reason we also like each other, don’t we? Never mind that I think you’re the most boring man alive, and you think I’m insane.”

“I don’t think you’re insane,” Leonardo said, bent over as he tried to catch his breath, his grey curls damp from the climb, his leather shoes covered in white dust. “But I do think you’re severely disturbed. Is this it then? Where are the bodies?”

“Best view of the sea in all of Gioia Tauro. _Is this it, then?_ ” Primo mimicked him, as he pulled out his cigarettes. “You’re a hard man to impress.”

“I doubt you brought me all the way here to show me the view.”

“No bodies this time, Mr Accountant. Although I’d shoot Angelo Calati in the head if I could get him in my scopes. No news on the grandmother, I assume?”

“Nothing conclusive,” Leonardo said, with that frown that meant he thought a particular subject was synonymous with bad business. 

“We should have grabbed her that night, instead of waiting til morning. If you find who warned her that we were after her…”

“That old woman didn’t mastermind the theft of your magical lighter,” Leonardo’s tone was as conciliatory as it was reasonable. He used it whenever he wanted to talk Primo out of doing something rash and, in most instances, murderous. “Wherever the two of them are, you won’t find them as long as they have the lighter. That’s six wishes between the two of them, and from what you said, the Calati boy used one to vanish in the middle of the village square.”

“I want what’s mine,” Primo muttered.

“You sound like Salvatore,” Leonardo remarked. He didn’t flinch when Primo glared at him. “It wasn’t yours to keep. You got a good bargain out of that genie. Make the most of it. It’s no use wanting more wonders. Miracles should be the realm of God, not of red-haired demons. Are you finally going to tell me why you brought me up here?”

Primo shrugged.

“It’s mine. The land. Now that the construction of the new terminal is underway, I thought I’d start a construction project of my own. Build myself a house that isn’t just made up of the cast-offs of all the Nizzutos that came before me. I’ll keep the house in the village, but I’ll be living here. I need you to start drafting cost estimates. Something modern, not a farmhouse.” He walked towards the edge of the cliff and tossed the end of his cigarette towards the green sea below. “I’m not my uncle.”

**24.**

All that Paul had was the name of a village on a piece of paper, written in Angelo’s neat hand, and the hope that he would recognize the house when he reached it. His mother had given him a lift to Naples, and during the three hour drive she only tried to change his mind twice, a first time shortly after they left, and the second time moments before they reached the city, Gail’s window rolled down to let in the cool autumn breeze. 

“You could visit your friend later… You should spend more time at home, Paul, with us. We have been waiting for you for so long, your brothers and sisters and me… If you just stayed a few more weeks…”

“I can’t,” Paul said, with all the brashness of youth. “I need to do this. But I’ll come visit when I can. I need to do things for myself right now.”

His mother nodded, remembering the lighter, no doubt. When he’d first appeared before her, she’d dropped it with a wordless cry. Now it was back in Paul’s pocket, useless unless he decided to light himself a cigarette. The carving on the side was gone, that curly-haired figure that looked like him, which had replaced an earlier carving that vaguely depicted the previous genie. Paul took it as a good sign that his mother’s wish had worked; not only was he free but no one would ever become stuck in the lighter again.

In Naples he embraced his mother, and promised her that he would look after himself, knowing full well that he was about to break that promise several times over, rushing back to a place where he’d been a prisoner, where he’d slept with a murderer and agreed to become a murderer himself. He boarded a bus and four hours later another one, as the state of the roads worsened and mountains appeared in the distance, dark blue against the paler blue of a cloudless sky. Autumn was well on its way, colder winds finding their way south. When the bus left Paul two miles away from the village, the road was slick with frost. On his way up to the village, he walked past two old women bundled up in black shawls, receiving only dark stares in return for his tentative _Buonasera._ By the time he reached Primo’s village the sun had set, and while there were a few lit windows in other houses along the street, Primo’s house was dark. Paul hadn’t exactly thought about what he would do if Primo wasn’t there. Try knocking on other doors, maybe, and ask if someone would take him in for the night, using his approximate Italian, since he had no knowledge of Calabrian, and the lighter no longer gave him the ability to be understood by whomever had found it and earned their three wishes. Primo’s car was parked out front, however. The windscreen wasn’t layered in frost like the parked cars Paul had passed on the way up: it had been used recently. He went to knock on the door.

He’d rehearsed what he would say, but his flighty little speech in Italian fled him the moment Primo opened the door, looking with his wild blue gaze as if he’d willingly shoot whomever had dared to disturb him in the middle of the night, although it was visible from his outfit, wine-red shirt, bright-red trousers, that Paul hadn’t exactly roused him from bed. Primo immediately launched into a brisk, cutting tirade, which Paul assumed must be made of a succession of threats. He raised his hands in weary surrender.

 _“What are you doing here?”_ Primo asked him, in Italian this time.

 _“I still owe you,”_ Paul tried. _“I owe you a third wish. I’m not… magic anymore._ But if you ask me for something, I’ll try to make up for it man, I’ll do my best. _What do you want?”_

Primo pulled his pack of cigarettes from his pocket, sticking one at the corner of his mouth and giving the other to Paul.

“Fire,” he said.

Paul produced the lighter with a cautious smile.

**25.**

Outside of the lighter, the continuity of time still took him by surprise: hours following hours, an afternoon spent watching a snowfall, the possibility of indolence, the luxury to be patient, extravagant, demanding, as he went on long walks away from the stifling village, as he picked up offerings left outside Primo’s front door, preserves and baskets of vegetables and fully cooked meals, the smell of roast meat luring him to the door. 

_“_ Is it because you’re the boss?” he’d asked Primo, who’d shrugged. 

_“Maybe it’s for you,”_ he’d said, with his off-kilter smile. Primo was always genuine when he smiled, but Paul knew the wrong response to a smile might also cause an abrupt shift in his mood. _“They know you’re my lucky charm, that all the good of these past few months came to us because of you, and nobody would be stupid enough to spit in the soup after that, they’ll worship you if they have to, as long as the money keeps coming in.”_

When he wasn’t eating peach preserves straight out of the jar, licking his sticky fingers, Paul was holding on to a pillow with both arms as Primo fucked him, and afterwards he’d mumble every foolish truth he knew Primo wouldn’t understand, “It’s so good with you and I can’t figure out why, maybe because you’re not afraid to want me, every other man I had sex with was drunk and taking something out on me, or just… trying to hide something inside me, you know? Family issues, some complex about their dick size, and wanting me or wanting men, it freaked them out… But you just… You just fuck me and I feel like… I feel like I could do this every day, man. If I could I’d do this every day.” 

He meant the sex but also the rest, going to the sea with Primo and waiting while he did whatever nefarious business he’d come there to do, swindling people on one of the construction sites while Paul climbed up the hill to where they were building Primo’s new house. There he sat at the edge of the cliff with one of the notebooks he’d brought from Rome, and worked on a movie script about the fearless daughter of a mobster who’d found an old lamp in her dead father’s possessions, and who fell for the genie stuck inside it.

Sometimes Paul woke up not knowing where he was, feeling unfamiliar with his own body, but then he often woke up in odd places, sprawled in the back of a car, on the tiled floor of a kitchen, leaning against a steel beam, as if he were trying to make up for years of not sleeping, of that disquieting half-sleep in the confines of the lighter. On certain days if he ate of a particular fruit, or took a walk under the moonlight, or laughed too heartily at Primo’s attempt at a joke in English, he’d start speaking in tongues again, including languages he’d never heard before. And luck did seem to follow him around so that Primo took to keeping him often at his side. There was no saying what shape or form Paul’s fortune would take; one day it might be a coin on the pavement, an animal bouncing out of the forest and straight into Primo’s line of fire as Paul put his hands over his eyes and winced at the shot. But early on someone had tried to take a shot at Primo in the street while Paul was walking alongside him, and the gun had backfired, shattering the man’s hand and jaw. 

“Maybe it’ll turn someday,” Paul ventured one night, just in case it needed to be said. “Maybe we’ll run out of luck.”

 _“You can make your own luck,”_ Primo answered, as he tied a golden chain around Paul’s neck, tucking a thin medal inside Paul’s jumper. _“But if I can get some extra help, I’ll take it.”_

Maybe tomorrow Paul would leave and abandon Primo, running back to Rome and to his mother, who must still think she’d half dreamt his return and whom he knew he’d hurt by taking off again so soon after he’d come back to her. Maybe he’d find Martine, kiss her again to see if her mouth still tasted of oranges and red wine, like it had that summer in Rome. Maybe he’d go visit his grandfather and get in trouble for stealing yet another priceless, dangerous artefact, or he’d visit his father for five minutes and fall out with him for another five years, or he’d go to Morocco, bury the lighter in the desert where he’d once dreamt of finding past civilisations smothered in sand. Maybe he’d finish writing that movie and sell it, maybe he’d write another one, a better one, maybe they’d all be terrible but he’d move to Hollywood anyways, drink cocktails by the side of other people’s pools as their gazes lingered on the wildfire of his hair. Maybe tomorrow he’d tire of Calabria, of the things Primo couldn’t tell him and the things he chose not to say; of the church services on Sundays where Paul stood out among the Calabrians’ sullen fervour as if he’d stepped down from one of the stained glass windows; of the cocaine stashed in the spare bedroom of the old house that Paul helped Primo package sometimes, before men and women showed up at the door to take it away; of the cocaine on Primo’s finger that he snorted with relish and regretted later as the high wore off and the fabric of his life showed itself for what it was, full of holes like the curtains in Primo’s house, eaten away by moths and mice, and sometimes he thought he would unravel entirely, lose what little grip he still had, forget he was human or that he was alive and just fall asleep in the middle of a road and not wake up for fifty years. But there were other times when he felt safe - as Primo’s hands tied that chain around his neck and his fingers lingered on Paul’s skin, “For you, Paul,” - secure in the knowledge that for now at least he’d found someone to take him just the way he was, side-effects of the curse and all, and maybe tomorrow he’d vanish. But it wasn’t tomorrow yet.


End file.
